5 ms·

Steve Jobs to Valleywag Why are You So Bitter?

12 points by keltecp11 16y ago

EatenByGrues 16y ago
Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems that lately it has been pretty popular to post other peoples e-mail conversations (see the whole TechCrunch vs. Fortune post a while back). I'm starting to think you shouldn't e-mail anyone who runs a major tech blog unless you want to see it made public.
- raganwald 16y ago
  I have always thought that the basic rule of email civility was that emails are private unless permission to post publicly is explicitly granted. I don't think bloggers of any kind have a special exemption, major or minor. It's simple courtesy to ask "May I quote you on this?" I try to remember to do it and I apologize if I've fallen short of this standard. Old-school reporters are usually make it clear when a conversation is "On the record." If I got an email response from Steve Jobs I would probably want to talk about it, but I wouldn't post it anywhere without asking first. The furthest I would go is to paraphrase it: "He emailed to tell me to take my talk of proprietary platform development being akin to sharecropping and shove it up my USB port." So what I would say is that lately people have been pretty un-civil about private emails. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed when I see it anywhere, regardless of who is doing the quoting or who is being quoted.
- CodeMage 16y ago
  Quite right, but expand that to you shouldn't send anything over the Internet unless either: a) the privacy of it is guaranteed and that guarantee can be legally enforced or b) you don't mind it being made public
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    And, most of all, when you are an important public figure, you must be very careful with what you express to anyone but your closest friends.
joubert 16y ago
Interesting use of a postscript at the beginning of a reply.
- iamdave 16y ago
  I believe the postscript was more of an addendum to the previous email...
madair 16y ago
Steve Jobs seems in denial about the jackboots kicking in doors over his IP claims. Some people will just never get it as long as it's not their door.
- raganwald 16y ago
  1. The police are not jackboots. Please don't Godwin a thread right off the bat. 2. If you are speaking of the search of a Gizmodo editors premises, this was conducted to gather evidence with respect to the alleged purchase of stolen physical property, not over IP. As far as "it" is concerned, I'm with Steve. If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly. If you aren't home when they arrive with the search warrant, I expect them to behave exactly the same way with your door as they would with anyone else. The whole busting in the door thing would be far more effective rhetoric if the editor in question had been home and the police had burst in with guns drawn and executed a high-risk takedown. That isn't what happened. They knocked, there was no-one home, they entered the property to execute their search warrent.
  - sabat 16y ago
    Please don't Godwin a thread right off the bat. Hee hee. If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly. You're probably right, but the objection I agree with is the priority that Jobs/Apple got because of who Steve is. They wouldn't bust down the door for just anyone. If some small startup complained that a prototype was stolen, the police would not have acted so promptly and decisively. And that's the problem I have with this. The response should have been proportional to the crime: it should have been "well, we have a lot of other complaints right now, and this isn't going to affect much of anything. Sorry." -- not "SIR YES SIR! We'll bust that door down forthwith, sir!"
    - madair 16y ago
      Exactly.
  - madair 16y ago
rbanffy 16y ago
"freedom from porn"?! I'm speechless. What's the next freedom we are to enjoy? Freedom from controversial arguments? Freedom from dissent? Freedom from bad taste?
- slackerIII 16y ago
  It is, for the first time in history, a garden of pure ideology.
  - pohl 16y ago
    Not really. I'm pretty sure Disney keeps their theme parks as porn-free as they can. I bet Target, Walmart, and Toys-R-Us do a pretty good job of keeping their stores porn-free. The App Store isn't doing anything that brick-and-mortar businesses haven't been doing for a long time.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      It's squashing our hopes that in this brave new world of the global internet things could be different than they have been.
      - pohl 16y ago
        "Different than they have been"... ...so y'all have hopes of disposing of the status quo of being able to take your daughter shopping without having to explain to her why those three men in the picture were filling all holes on that nice lady? Speaking as someone who has no issue with porn, and who has shamelessly rubbed a few out to some in my day, I've got to say that being able to point mobile Safari anywhere I want to, and to sync pictures and movies if I'm so inclined, is sufficient for me. Not having porn in the App Store is no more a blow against high hopes for the internet than is not having porn at overstock.com.
        CodeMage 16y ago
        Thank goodness rbanffy wasn't sarcastic or anything ;)
ryanwaggoner 16y ago
Lots of very good discussion on this email exchange here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350885 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350885
boredguy8 16y ago
Money quote: "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"
- CodeMage 16y ago
  It's definitely an important quote. It goes pretty well with the whole "freedom from porn" and "no one is forcing you to use iPad or develop for it" attitude. It shows how good Jobs is at sophistry. I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations.
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    > I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations. Actually, I disagree. I think you run the risk of missing important details if you're doing an untrained analysis. For instance, a layman might say - "Look how busy Amazon.com is - it could be so prettier with a more minimalistic interface!" They might not realize that Amazon are fanatical about split testing to get things to a minute detail. Amazon is a busy site, but it does what it's trying to do remarkably well. Someone untrained in web design could say "I don't need to be a web designer to spot an ugly website that's too busy." But they'd be looking at it entirely the wrong way.
    - CodeMage 16y ago
      Not being trained in something will certainly prevent you from giving an expert opinion on it, but that's not what I was saying. Someone untrained in web design could also say "I don't like Amazon's look", just like someone who has no idea about why Flash is not allowed on iPad would notice that his favorite casual web game portal is not working on his iPad. Or, to use my simple example, if I don't know jack about car engines (and I don't), I can still tell that somethings wrong if the engine sounds 10x louder than usually or if there's a funny smell coming out from under the hood. There's more than a single step from that to telling my mechanic that "my conbobatron is confusticated".
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

12 points by keltecp11 16y ago

Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems that lately it has been pretty popular to post other peoples e-mail conversations (see the whole TechCrunch vs. Fortune post a while back). I'm starting to think you shouldn't e-mail anyone who runs a major tech blog unless you want to see it made public.

raganwald 16y ago
I have always thought that the basic rule of email civility was that emails are private unless permission to post publicly is explicitly granted. I don't think bloggers of any kind have a special exemption, major or minor. It's simple courtesy to ask "May I quote you on this?" I try to remember to do it and I apologize if I've fallen short of this standard. Old-school reporters are usually make it clear when a conversation is "On the record." If I got an email response from Steve Jobs I would probably want to talk about it, but I wouldn't post it anywhere without asking first. The furthest I would go is to paraphrase it: "He emailed to tell me to take my talk of proprietary platform development being akin to sharecropping and shove it up my USB port." So what I would say is that lately people have been pretty un-civil about private emails. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed when I see it anywhere, regardless of who is doing the quoting or who is being quoted.
CodeMage 16y ago
Quite right, but expand that to you shouldn't send anything over the Internet unless either: a) the privacy of it is guaranteed and that guarantee can be legally enforced or b) you don't mind it being made public
- rbanffy 16y ago
  And, most of all, when you are an important public figure, you must be very careful with what you express to anyone but your closest friends.

joubert 16y ago

Interesting use of a postscript at the beginning of a reply.

iamdave 16y ago
I believe the postscript was more of an addendum to the previous email...

madair 16y ago

Steve Jobs seems in denial about the jackboots kicking in doors over his IP claims. Some people will just never get it as long as it's not their door.

raganwald 16y ago
1. The police are not jackboots. Please don't Godwin a thread right off the bat. 2. If you are speaking of the search of a Gizmodo editors premises, this was conducted to gather evidence with respect to the alleged purchase of stolen physical property, not over IP. As far as "it" is concerned, I'm with Steve. If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly. If you aren't home when they arrive with the search warrant, I expect them to behave exactly the same way with your door as they would with anyone else. The whole busting in the door thing would be far more effective rhetoric if the editor in question had been home and the police had burst in with guns drawn and executed a high-risk takedown. That isn't what happened. They knocked, there was no-one home, they entered the property to execute their search warrent.
- sabat 16y ago
  Please don't Godwin a thread right off the bat. Hee hee. If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly. You're probably right, but the objection I agree with is the priority that Jobs/Apple got because of who Steve is. They wouldn't bust down the door for just anyone. If some small startup complained that a prototype was stolen, the police would not have acted so promptly and decisively. And that's the problem I have with this. The response should have been proportional to the crime: it should have been "well, we have a lot of other complaints right now, and this isn't going to affect much of anything. Sorry." -- not "SIR YES SIR! We'll bust that door down forthwith, sir!"
  - madair 16y ago
    Exactly.
- madair 16y ago

rbanffy 16y ago

"freedom from porn"?! I'm speechless. What's the next freedom we are to enjoy? Freedom from controversial arguments? Freedom from dissent? Freedom from bad taste?

slackerIII 16y ago
It is, for the first time in history, a garden of pure ideology.
- pohl 16y ago
  Not really. I'm pretty sure Disney keeps their theme parks as porn-free as they can. I bet Target, Walmart, and Toys-R-Us do a pretty good job of keeping their stores porn-free. The App Store isn't doing anything that brick-and-mortar businesses haven't been doing for a long time.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    It's squashing our hopes that in this brave new world of the global internet things could be different than they have been.
    - pohl 16y ago
      "Different than they have been"... ...so y'all have hopes of disposing of the status quo of being able to take your daughter shopping without having to explain to her why those three men in the picture were filling all holes on that nice lady? Speaking as someone who has no issue with porn, and who has shamelessly rubbed a few out to some in my day, I've got to say that being able to point mobile Safari anywhere I want to, and to sync pictures and movies if I'm so inclined, is sufficient for me. Not having porn in the App Store is no more a blow against high hopes for the internet than is not having porn at overstock.com.
      - CodeMage 16y ago
        Thank goodness rbanffy wasn't sarcastic or anything ;)

ryanwaggoner 16y ago

Lots of very good discussion on this email exchange here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350885 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350885

boredguy8 16y ago

Money quote: "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

CodeMage 16y ago
It's definitely an important quote. It goes pretty well with the whole "freedom from porn" and "no one is forcing you to use iPad or develop for it" attitude. It shows how good Jobs is at sophistry. I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations. Actually, I disagree. I think you run the risk of missing important details if you're doing an untrained analysis. For instance, a layman might say - "Look how busy Amazon.com is - it could be so prettier with a more minimalistic interface!" They might not realize that Amazon are fanatical about split testing to get things to a minute detail. Amazon is a busy site, but it does what it's trying to do remarkably well. Someone untrained in web design could say "I don't need to be a web designer to spot an ugly website that's too busy." But they'd be looking at it entirely the wrong way.
  - CodeMage 16y ago
    Not being trained in something will certainly prevent you from giving an expert opinion on it, but that's not what I was saying. Someone untrained in web design could also say "I don't like Amazon's look", just like someone who has no idea about why Flash is not allowed on iPad would notice that his favorite casual web game portal is not working on his iPad. Or, to use my simple example, if I don't know jack about car engines (and I don't), I can still tell that somethings wrong if the engine sounds 10x louder than usually or if there's a funny smell coming out from under the hood. There's more than a single step from that to telling my mechanic that "my conbobatron is confusticated".

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]